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Therefore, when I use the word "news," it means information that has not been disseminated to the general public. And, the fact that Chopin and Brahms rolled most of their chords and asynchronized their melody lines is not known, not only to the general public, but also to a whole lot of classical musicians.

I studied under Jack Roberts in 1971 at North Texas. Two studios down was Richard Cass, and the Assistant Dean was Bob Rogers. Jack was a student of Gyorgy Sandor, Cass studied under Cortot, and Rogers got his degree at Julliard under Carl Friedberg.

I finished up at UT Austin in 1981, and between the 1,300 music majors at NTSU and the folks in Austin, there was not one word said about this type of playing.

That definitely was the case when I attended NTSU from 1971-73. I studied with Roberts, took Piano Pedagogy from Rogers, and later studied with Cass when he moved to UMKC in 1976. This particular issue was never discussed - although Mr. Roberts tried very hard to break me of the bad habit I'd slipped into of sometimes "rolling" chords when playing Brahms......

Mark_C
Yikes! 10000 Post Club Member
Registered: 11/11/09
Posts: 20323
Loc: New York

You still have much unanswered ground to cover here.

The things we're raising are important and could be good practice for you, because they'll be raised if you succeed in taking your stuff to a larger stage -- and it wouldn't be bad for you to be ready.

This topic was as well brought up on the Adult Beginners Forum and also on the Piano Teachers Forum and the OP collected there the same overall response as here in the Pianist Corner. Those other two threads are dead, which to me means that there is nothing to add to the topic.As this thread here is still active, but I am afraid to once more see a forum thread on risk to develope into smart-alec discussions ending up in endless terminology and personal misunderstandings, I would like to try to summarize all the story like this: what´s for the OP an exciting insight into alternative musical fashions, as they have always been around, it to others is not much exciting but just a matter of knowing that music can be annotated, interpreted and expressed in different ways. From beginners to teachers to university study pianists comments have been collected which show agreement on the practice to roll chords and disagreement that there would be something amazingly new about it.So, let us spread the word that different musical fashions existed and exist and that it is not necessary to stylistically stick to only "one truth" on how to make music. Isn´t the story that simple?